My girlfriend and I had planned to spend a few days exploring the Cotswolds, but the blissful lassitude generated by sunshine and shortbread meant we’d barely made it out of my parents’ garden. Well, said my mother, if we couldn’t stretch to Cirencester, we should at least visit Swinbrook, so we could see the Mitford graves.

The Mitford graves? I’d known, in a fuzzy sort of way, that the Mitfords had grown up nearby. But I wasn’t aware of their new status as the west Oxfordshire equivalent of the Brontë sisters. All I really remembered was a neighbour describing a strange, naughty group of girls, whom he hadn’t been allowed to play with because his parents didn’t want him learning (as they had from their governess) how to shoplift from Woolworths.

Over the intervening years, however, the Mitfords have become not just a family, but a mythology. Each has her place in the cosmology: Nancy the Writer, Jessica the Communist, Unity the Nazi, Diana the Fascist, Debo the Duchess. In the gripping volume of their letters edited by Diana’s daughter-in-law, Charlotte Mosley, entries are marked not with names, but totems: hammer and sickle, swastika, quill, coronet.

The graves themselves were less dramatic than I’d expected, with a blessed lack of signs welcoming you to “Mitford Country” (give it time…). But they did provide evidence of the sisters’ fluctuating fortunes. Debo, the sole survivor and matron of Chatsworth, is an icon of unimpeachable Englishness. Unity is the eternal symbol of the aristocracy’s flirtation, political and emotional, with Hitler. Even the quiet sister, Pamela, who devoted much of her life to rural domesticity (represented by Mosley with a faintly patronising crest of crossed spoons), is the subject of a new biography.

But what of the eldest? On our visit, someone had left a hand-woven wreath of wild purple flowers atop Diana’s resting place. A handful had also been scattered over Unity. For Nancy, not a petal – just a tombstone fast retreating into illegibility. It seemed a poor reward for the writer who did so much to create the Mitford myth in the first place.

Apart from an excellent, Debo-owned gastropub, Swinbrook’s other attraction is within the church itself: the tomb of the Fettiplaces, the local lords. Their remarkable effigies are stacked by the altar in great alabaster bunk beds, each lying on its side with head propped jauntily on elbow, as if inviting visiting maidens to join their eternal repose.

It’s hard not to worry, however, that the church is becoming something of a monument itself. A wooden board near the entrance lists the names of the curates over the centuries. In the Victorian era, Swinbrook started a slow but steady series of mergers with its neighbours, to the point where its current overseer holds the unwieldy title of Vicar of Burford, Fulbrook & Taynton with Asthall, Swinbrook & Widford. I know there aren’t the worshippers – or personnel – to sustain anything more. But it would be a shame for all those little churches to fall as silent as the Fettiplaces’ tombs.

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Is there any species as purely creepy as the jellyfish? Snakes and spiders send a shiver up the spine, but at least there’s an intelligence there. Jellyfish are the essence of motiveless malignity. The translucent menaces don’t actively target a beach – they simply multiply, silently but inexorably, until they have claimed it as their own. This week alone, news reports have them wreaking havoc from Florida to Spain.

Still, they have their moments. A few years ago, my sister made much sport of my whimpering after I was stung off the Italian coast – and my refusal, the next day, to go back in. I have to confess that when she then leapt out of the water, shrieking with pain, it felt like those unfathomable creatures had a sense of justice after all.